On Thu, 21 Aug 1997, Charles Blair wrote:
> Thanks to Joost Kooi for suggesting I could bypass my mis-installed
> X installation by typing ``linux single'' at the LILO prompt. This
> allowed me to delete some stuff and salvage my system.
'single' still has many daemon processes running - you can do some
repair or maintainence work in single mode but you can't safely do an
fsck because the disks are mounted rw.
some other tasks (like moving a filesystem from one partition to
another) are also best done when there are no daemons running.
e.g. moving /var or /var/spool to another disk or partition while
daemons that use that filesystem are running (for example syslogd,
sendmail, innd, squid, and many others) is not a good idea. The only
way to be sure that you have correctly transferred all of the data is
to be sure that nothing is running which can change it while it's being
copied.
btw, this has no great bearing on your X installation problem - it's
just a general comment that there IS a very useful difference between
'linux single' mode and 'linux emergency' mode.
> As a minor matter, typing ``linux emergency'' did not work. I was
> able to get on. Even though I was supposedly root, however, I was
> told that all my files were read-only, so I could not change.
that is because the root filesystem was mounted read-only. this is not a
bug, it's a feature.
you should have seen a message on the screen (just before the root
password prompt) which told you that the root partition was mounted
read-only and that you could remount it read-write by typing:
mount -n -o rw,remount /
i find it's useful to also run:
mount /proc
open
open
open
before doing anything else. the /proc filesystem is so that you can get
PIDs of running tasks (so you can run "kill" or "killall" for example
- which is useful sometimes), and the "open"s are so that you have a
few spare virtual consoles to do stuff in if required. when booted in
emergency mode, ^C doesn't work to kill processes. setting it with stty
doesn't fix it either.
(btw, if you are going to run fsck on the partition then run it BEFORE
remounting the disk RW. Do not ever run fsck on a RW filesystem.)
craig
--
craig sanders
networking consultant Available for casual or contract
temporary autonomous zone system administration tasks.
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